"Farmers Try Political Force to Twist Open California’s Taps"

"Few in agriculture have shaped the debate over water more than the several hundred owners of an arid finger of farmland west of Fresno."

"FIVE POINTS, Calif. — The message that Maria L. Gutierrez gave legislators on Capitol Hill was anguished and blunt: California’s historic drought had not merely left farmland idle. It had destroyed Latino farm workers’ jobs, shuttered Latino businesses and thrown Latino families on the street. Yet Congress had turned a deaf ear to their pleas for more water to revive farming and farm labor.

So Latinos — the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group, she noted pointedly — were sending a warning that politicians could not ignore.

'We created an organization that’s called El Agua Es Asunto de Todos — Water Is Everybody’s Business — so the Latino voice can be heard,' Ms. Gutierrez, who described herself as an El Agua volunteer, said in October 2013 at the meeting with lawmakers. 'Don’t devastate our economy. Don’t take our jobs away.'"

Michael Wines and Jennifer Medina report for the New York Times December 30, 2015.